CBS Sunday Morning,
one of the best shows on TV for grown-ups (Just don’t make your elementary
school-aged kids watch it!), had an interior design show this morning, and in
one segment, they covered the design of the office cubicle. The host referred to office cubicles as: “…squared-off, soul-killing, monuments to monotony.” (Whoever writes this
show really can be quite brilliant at times.) But they really went out of their
way to get us in the right frame of mind to be horrified, because they started
the segment on this wonderful furniture company (Herman Miller), they showed us
some of their more beautiful designs, spoke lovingly of them, and then said
that it might surprise us that they also make the modern torture chamber, where creativity goes to die: the
office cubicle.
Well, this bit on the office cubicle reminded me of a work
experience I had with regard to office cubicles. Yes, I used to work at an
advertising agency in New York City whose building seemed to have been built
with the office cubicle in mind. Yes, each story of this building was a huge
room filled with a labyrinth of drab squared-off office cubicles, and along the
outer wall of the building, there was something to motivate us all to achieve a
promotion: a line of actual offices with large windows. The only problem was,
these offices were about the same size as the office cubicles, with just enough
room for the door to swing open into the room and also fit a small desk and chair
and another chair for a visitor. The walls were all the same size, and the
space was roughly the same size as your average apartment bathroom, but there
was that window… Yes, the window was literally floor-to ceiling, and I’m sure
the building designers thought this was surely an amenity everyone in the whole
building would covet. And it might have been too, if not for the view. For you
see, these windows looked out upon a dirty alleyway behind the building, and
rather than looking across to see another building’s office windows, we saw a depressing
loading dock area with a big dirty cinder block wall with soot covering it, and
as we were on the second floor, with the floor-to-ceiling windows, the office’s
occupant couldn’t help but see a daily parade of belligerent and passed-out
drunks, junkies shooting up, assorted other sketchy types and misanthropes, etc. There was this
great cartoon poster of all the wacky stuff that goes on in New York City from the 1980s called: “And I Love New York”, and it looked like something you might
have expected to see in that poster if it had covered the alleys behind the
buildings. I guess they could have wall-papered the bottom half of their
windows, but wow, what a pain that would have been; and with the rest of the
view, they might as well have wall papered the whole thing and just gotten a
cubicle like the rest of us with a door. And I’m not sure that this design
really made people yearn for the upward mobility they were supposed to be seeking; at least,
not at that company.
